First Reports: Ali Rafie And Revisions Of Fact

The first reports early last week
told the story of a disgruntled young man who had been kicked out
of a band called the Yellow Dogs, a band of Iranian expatriates.
The man, traumatized by his exile and enraged at his friends, the
story went, killed his former bandmates before killing himself.

“Iranian ‘murdered bandmates’ after group ousted him,” read the
New York Post headline. “Rafie betrayed his bandmates,
stealing money and equipment last year,” that story went. “Rafie
was kicked out of the group, but on Monday returned with a
vengeance.” A source told the Post that Rafie shouted,
“something like, ‘Why did you bring me over here [from Iran] and
then throw me out?'” as he gunned his victims down.

The Wall Street Journal identified the shooter as a man
named “Raefe Ahkbar,” describing him as a former member of either
the Yellow Dogs or the Free Keys, or maybe both—kicked out for
selling off the band’s equipment (maybe).

The New York Times first reported that the shooter was
a former member of the Yellow Dogs. The next iteration hedged this
claim, paraphrasing Ray Kelly: “The assailant, who was not
immediately identified, was believed to be another Iranian-American
musician, possibly playing with the Yellow Dogs or another group
called the Free Keys,” a version of the relevant article from the
Times website reads (archived
by the Wayback Machine). Their follow-up reporting
was remarkable, everything that the first reports were not.

The Associated Press updated its
wire story with the note “CORRECTS TO CLARIFY RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN SHOOTER AND VICTIMS.” Blog posts from websites from
Pitchfork to
Gawker demonstrated the confusion that unfolds when reporting
outfits stumble. Those sites updated as information changed;
BuzzFeed, nine days later, hasn’t
updated a post that identifies the shooter as someone named
“Raefe Akhbar” in its first sentence.

This was not a breaking news story, though there was definitely
a correct tabloid impulse to get to it fast. These stories were
printed because the NYPD announced the crime: the events had
concluded. Many claims initially made about the shooter, his
victims, and their relationship—as laid out by the NYPD—were fuzzy
or not even accurate.

The name of the shooter was Ali Akbar Mohammadi Rafie. His
victims were two brothers, Arash and Soroush Faramazad, and another
Iranian musician, Ali Eskandarian. Arash and Soroush were members
of the band The Yellow Dogs. Arash was also a founding member of
another band, The Free Keys. Ali Rafie had been kicked out of The
Free Keys a year-and-a-half ago, in May of 2012.

The Free Keys and the Yellow Dogs have a long-standing
relationship, stretching far back before members of either group
left Iran. They speak of each other as brothers—as family.

Arash Faramazad, a drummer, founded the Free Keys Trio with Arya
Afshar and Pooya Hosseini; he would eventually join his brother
Soroush (a.k.a. “Looloosh”), a guitarist, in the Yellow Dogs. Over
their years together in Tehran, the bands worked together to create
an underground, D.I.Y. music scene. Playing in a rock and roll band
is considered “un-Islamic” in Iran; public performances are
irregular at best. (“The law has a problem with rock music,”
is how
the band put it to CNN in 2009.) They played shows in
soundproofed basements, banging out dancey post-punk anthems before
the cops showed up to shut things down.

The Yellow Dogs were eventually featured in a fictionalized
“near-documentary”
called No One Knows About Persian Cats. In January, 2010,
after coming to the U.S. to play at South by Southwest on
entertainment visas, the Yellow Dogs stayed and applied for
political asylum. By the time they were granted it last year, they
had embraced the Brooklyn music scene wholeheartedly—and had been
embraced in kind. The Free Keys emigrated to New York in 2011,
living for a time with the Yellow Dogs.

A statement from The Yellow Dogs claims that The Free Keys
recruited Ali Rafie before coming to New York in December of 2011,
after their original bassist’s visa application was denied. The
Free Keys played their first show in the United States on March 15,
2012. In May, after just three shows, Rafie was asked to leave the
band: it was “a result of
personal and musical differences.”

The bands’ manager, Ali Salehezadeh, told the Associated Press,
“a
very petty conflict” caused both the Free Keys and the Yellow
Dogs to sever ties with Rafie completely. No one in the bands saw
him again, as far as we know, until the night he shot the Farazmand
brothers and Ali Eskandarian.

“This is the story of a loser with delusions of self-grandiose
[sic.], a pseudo-religion and a loaded gun,” Free Keys founding
member Arya Afshar, now in Istanbul, wrote on his Facebook the day
after the shooting.

Vandida; Rafie at far right.

Arya left Iran when he was seventeen to avoid Iran’s state-mandated
military service. In December of 2009, he was living in India with
other members of the Free Keys. The trio by this time had expanded
to a quintet, adding the services of Aryan (“Anthony”) Azarmgin and
Ali Rafie. Everyone knew Rafie from the Tehran scene, where he had
been a bassist with the metal band Vandida.

“He was a quiet and an all-around unobjectionable kid. I’d be
lying if I said I didn’t like him,” Arya told me over Facebook
messages. “Pooya [Hosseini] and Arash [Faramazad] knew him even
before I did.”

After a year in India, the Free Keys moved to Turkey to apply
for visas to come to the United States. After a first failed
attempt, everyone except Arya returned to Iran to wait until they
could start the application process again.

“By the time everything was in order for a new application, my
passport had less than six months left on it, which meant I
couldn’t apply for the visa until I renewed it,” Arya told me. “As
a runaway soldier, renewing my passport took ages, by which time
everyone was already in New York.”

“Once there, the guys sought asylum, so there was no visa
renewal process for them, and subsequently, no such ongoing
application for me to join, as entertainer visas aren’t granted to
individuals but the whole band.”

Arya enrolled at Istanbul’s Bilgi University in order to gain
resident status, studying music and planning to join his friends in
New York.

These young musicians saw America as a means to an end,
somewhere to play the kind of music they wanted to play without
getting hassled for it, with the hope to share that music with
people who wouldn’t get hassled for listening to it. “America has
always been a stepping stone for us, a platform to flourish,” Arya
wrote. Not so for Ali Rafie.

“America changed him,” Arya wrote. “He was suddenly using
American phrases in the middle of Farsi dialogue, as if English was
hacked into his brain. He acted like he was superior to everyone,
giving life advice. Everyone in New York were pussies and hipsters,
all the Iranians were wannabes, and everyone in the house were
selfish and ‘just playing music for the pussy.'”

The last time Arya spoke to Ali, he told me, was via Skype
around the time he was kicked out of the Free Keys. Ali told Arya
that he’d broken his leg while working as a bike messenger, and
that the other Iranians had turned on him. Arya confronted his
friends, who then informed him that Ali hadn’t broken anything at
all but was playing up a minor injury. “He was basically mooching
off everybody, not paying rent, and stealing cash,” Arya said he
was told.

Ali’s visa expired in May, 2012, and that same month he was
kicked out of his band and his house. “I lost touch with Ali after
our last Skype, and paid no attention to his constant rants and
conspiracy theory shares on Facebook,” Arya wrote.

“From what I know, he’d been threatening Aryan and Pooya lately,
and talking about suicide the past two months, but never directly
with me,” he wrote. The Times reported that
Rafie had attempted suicide by swallowing a number of pills
less than a month before the shooting.

Lonely and broke, he sat in his apartment in Ridgewood. The
Yellow Dogs and their expat rock and roll paradise was just a few
stops away on the L train.